I really don't know how he managed to get the selection of guests that he's had especially in the early days of the podcast.
The guests themselves make value judgments of whether this polite, motivated, knowledgeable, reasonably boring guy with a sizeable audience and good credentials can help them to spread their own messages without much journalistic pushback.
His audio quality is also not bad.
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Personal opinion: The interviews are far too long. I'd like an informed opinion of the best (as opposed to most famous or controversial or odd) guests. If a biology expert told me Lex's interview with Eric Lander was a Must Listen, I'd value that more than, "oh! It's three hours of Elon Musk, but his personal values are well-known and haven't changed."
I would listen to a few very interesting conversations unedited OR a larger collection of reasonably interesting, short, heavily curated conversations. I enjoy hearing about subjects I normally don't encounter, and some of his guests bring this experience. Listening to months of audio to find these gems is not for me.
I prefer a small group of podcasts that have shorter episodes, entertaining/engaging hosts, interesting guests,
I do sometimes have longer podcast conversations with people I know well but 20-30 minutes feels like the natural sweet spot for my typical interview.
For the later guests who were not colleagues at MIT or his previous contract work at Google, they do what many guests do: they look at the interviewer's previous episodes and see if they like his style. It's a big commitment to spend ~3 hours with someone they don't know so they use the previous episodes as a "résumé" to see if it's worth their time.
>, not following up on what the guests says
And the parent comment you replied to said the opposite: >Lex will often say something like "oh that's interesting, let's talk about that"
Not debating you but it's an interesting observation to me that different people will see contradictory evidence.
>, reading from a list of prepared questions
The way a lot of these podcasts' preparations work behind-the-scenes with emails/phone calls before the actual interview is that the interviewer will propose a list of topics to talk about. The guest can also add (or subtract) from the list of topics because they are the ones who ultimately agree whether to appear on the podcast at all.
Therefore, using prepared questions is actually respecting the guest's agreement to be interviewed.
Now, if on the other hand you're complaining about the delivery of the prepared questions... such as "Lex should memorize the 50 prepared questions perfectly instead of reading a sheet of paper in front of him" or "Lex should use a cue card or teleprompter off camera to read the prepared question" ... it seems like a really trivial thing to complain about.
Unless you have some inside information, you can't know that this is the case. I find it difficult to believe given that some of his early guests are
Steven Pinker - episode 3
Guido van Rossum - episode 6
Eric Schmidt - episode 8
Elon Musk - episode 18
It's naive to think that you get a retired-Google-CEO-billionare by cold calling and getting him to review and like the first 7 episodes of your newly started podcast.
Hey, you cut out the quote where I conditionally qualified my statement with "later guests who were not colleagues at MIT or his previous contract work at Google,".
Anyway, it seems reasonable to presume that his connections at Google went up the chain and reached Eric Schmidt. So it wouldn't have been a true cold call.
He said Elon Musk happened because his A.I. research on Tesla self-driving was already seen by Elon.
Some of the early guests who were professors via his MIT connections. Some guests (especially physicists) might have been connections with his dad who is a physics professor. His older brother runs a biotech company so that may also spur some introductions.
With "6-degrees-of-separation" being what it is, what looks like a cold-call to outsiders ("how did he get Eric Schmidt?!?") could have actually been a friend-of-a-friend or colleague-of-a-colleague. I'm a nobody and I happen to know the billionaire fund manager and owner of a major sports team. With 3-degrees of separation with various past co-workers, I can connect the dots to several CEOs of major corporations. That doesn't mean they'd agree to be on my hypothetical podcast if I asked them but if a few of them said "yes", some viewers would wonder, "how did he manage to get X with a cold call?" -- The answer is that my extended social graph is invisible to viewers and it really wasn't a cold call.
Examples of "later" guests that are more "cold calls" with no help from MIT/Google were Dan Carlin (Hardcore History) and some of the female guests who weren't scientists. This isn't speculation because the guests themselves said they looked at Lex's previous podcasts to see his work.
In general, the playbook for a new podcaster (with no audience of millions yet) to get guests follows a similar trajectory:
1) Start with personal connections to build a body of work. Cold-calling famous people won't work at this early stage because they don't have any prior work to see to if it's worth their time.
2) The previous podcasts episodes can start to act as a résumé so host doesn't have to rely on personal connections. The ever-increasing audience numbers also pads the résumé and adds credibility to the interviewer.
3) The transition eventually happens where interviewer can get new guests based on reputation more than personal connections.
So what do you think that means in a deep, pilosophical way-of-life way?
"The meaning of life" is an ok question, but asking every interviewee about aliens and sci-fi technology, regardless of background, is getting repetitive. It doesn't seem to really give you, or the audience much to work with, and basically encourages the interviewee to spout off random stuff.
Now, the Jim Keller interview, that was good stuff because Jim Keller is an interesting person and a good people manager.
- Lex’s weird comments and massive oversimplification of ethical topics. He always seems to ask people if X is Good or Evil, with no consideration of nuance. I get that he’s a computer scientist and not a ethicist, but I somewhat expected more.
- He doesn’t question the guest or curate the discussion very well. Some of the episodes are 3, 4, 5 hours long, which is madness. I want to listen to his guests, but I can’t spend 5 hours on a conversation that has an hour of insight. This is the job of a good host.
Overall the strength of his podcast comes from the quality of guests. I wish he would take his role as journalist/interviewer a little more seriously.
-unnuanced prompts/questions tend to trigger better responses. highly nuanced questions don't. it's up to the answerer to freely craft their response w/ little cognitive load or host-assumptions to manage.
-some of the longer podcasts are where the veil of persona disappears & one can see the authentic guest. I like long, deep, authentic conversations personally.
And to add more to your second point: Lex is catering to people who want long form interviews. There are thousands of other podcasts that fit the interview to the time rather than fit the time to the interview for those that don't like this.
- Long is not equal to deep. There is a lot of empty filler content that isn’t authentic or relevant.
You see, for me this is almost always the stuff I don't care about. It almost always ends up either rambling personal anecdotes and the two of them sharing 'funny' stories or two people pontificating on subjects way outside their areas of expertise. Both of which are completely uninteresting to me.
Two blokes chatting bollocks about stuff they don't really understand is only fun if I'm one of them.
I'm not even in the efficiency "play it at 2x" camp. But I pretty much have zero interest in hearing two or more people randomly ramble on. The fact that NPR/NPR-like podcasts and radio shows tend to have segments on even 1 hour shows probably says something about what pros find works best.
(I'm also a fan of shorter conference presentations although at large conferences, I appreciate that there are logistical issues associated with moving people between rooms too frequently.)
His guest list is impressive.
The topics range from interesting to overhyped (bitcoin/crypto).
Lex's own problems start with his voice: he sounds drugged, slurred, and frankly somewhat dim, the last impression strongly reinforced by his questions and follow-up.
The episodes themselves run too long, and would benefit greatly in my view by much tighter editing. Aiming for a set length (20, 30, or 60 minutes, say), going over that in the interview, and editing down, would be a vast improvement.